1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to wireless communication systems and, more particularly, to multicast and broadcast services in wireless communication systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication standards such as Long Term Evolution (LTE, LTE-Advanced) support broadcasting or multicasting services such as the multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) or the enhanced multimedia broadcast multicast service (eMBMS). The MBMS services broadcast or multicast data from base stations over the air interface on channels that can be received by one or more user equipment (UE). The eMBMS is an enhanced version of MBMS that provides additional features such as an architecture and physical layer enhancements that allow the eMBMS service to carry multimedia information to the UE. The term “MBMS” may be used to refer to either MBMS or eMBMS depending on the context. Typically, the UE subscribe to particular programs so that they may subsequently receive the programs, e.g., as packets transmitted by the base stations using the MBMS service.
Missing packets or corrupted packets may be detected at the application layer of the UE and requests for retransmission of the missing or corrupted packets may be generated at the application layer using a dedicated channel. If the number of retransmissions using dedicated channels increases, the resources consumed by the dedicated channels would increase and the spectrum efficiency would be reduced. Moreover, the retransmission requests are the same for the missing or corrupted packets and so the network that is providing the MBMS service is not able to use the retransmission requests to determine whether the packets were lost or corrupted due to network congestion, radio link conditions, or other problems in the network.